austin skate notes

While cycling about friday afternoon with my camera, I caught the unmistakeable odor of rotting flesh near the Congress Avenue bridge. So pungent was this smell, that it overwhelmed the pervasive bat turd stench that usually greets pedestrians crossing Town Lake. I’ve read the Zombie Survival Guide cover-to-cover three times, so I’m clued into the tell-tale signs of a zombie uprising. When I saw the shuffling mob coming across Congress Avenue bridge, I was ahead of the game. Already on my bicycle, I had Lesson #7 taken care of from the Top Ten Lessons for Surviving a Zombie Attack: "Get out of the car, get onto the bike."

Uncharacteristic for a zombie mob, these decayed undead were carrying picket signs and moving in a single direction- City Hall. I followed them at a safe distance snapping photos from my moving bicycle. That’s why most of them are somewhat blurry. They seemed uninterested in the delicious living flesh sharing the sidewalks with them, and were more focused on conveying the messages on their protest signs: "Marriage = 1 zombie + 1 zombie" or "If you can’t live with us, join us." One sign was written in the zombie vernacular of some smeared blood and a few bloody hand prints.

At City Hall, there were plenty of bystanders puzzled by the zombie’s uninterest in devouring them. It was almost as if the living humans felt snubbed by these activist undead. On the City Hall plaza where skateboarding is explicitly banned by law, these zombies made speeches complaining about Medicade interfering with the creation of more zombies and they also were upset by zombie jobs being outsourced to India.

Coincidentally, one of the living bystanders approached me asking what the protest was about. Areru was an Indian man fresh from Delhi who was spending his very first day in America. I tried to explain to Areru that these zombies were clamouring for equal rights but the concepts were lost on him. I ended up scribbling some directions to Barton Springs for him. He’s working at the neighboring CSC building helping manage an outsourced programming project with Indian programmers.

While the zombies chanted in grunts and groans, a band of pirates launched a counter protest on the plaza steps. They were pretty much anti-zombie in their messages. The zombies attacked the pirates and even though the pirates were armed with swords, the zombies appeared to be prevailing. Then a christ figure emerged and made a speech that united both zombies and pirates as allies against their common enemy, which apparently is vampire ninjas. Finally, they all went to a bar together.

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Wes’s digital camera is kaput, so it’s unlikely we’ll see anymore photos from him until he can save up for the digital SLR he’s planning to replace the old point-and-shoot with. Fortunately, Shawn Collie is shooting digital and uploading some great stuff in the ASN Gallery. Check out his fancy lighting setups.